Prenatal downtempo

Here is an exercise: Sometime after dark, find a quiet place and take some minutes to empty the mind and allow the noise of your thoughts to dissipate. Finally, when the mind is quiet, when the short term memory has been flushed and the inputs cleansed, the body becomes ready to listen. This is the appropriate state from which to explore the creative work of another. And it’s a fitting moment to delve into the strange but warm cocoon that DARKSIDE weaves in the darkness. 

You find yourself submersed in an abstract soundscape of downtempo, minimal house. All that exists is a nocturnal rhythm that takes you somewhere deep, a place at once familiar and curiously alien. It’s rather like imagining yourself in the womb, where perceptive faculties are erased and consciousness of self is a nebulous idea. Yet there is a heartbeat that is pumping somewhere which echoes your own, and the rhythm is lulling. In this space, other sounds enter mysteriously, as if through a veil. Their frequencies are isolated and vivid, bringing bursts of color into the nothingness through rough-edged bits of static and disrupted signal. They grasp gently at the edges of your consciousness, a suggestion of an idea without precise edges. A fragment of a violin, a soft organ blare, a twang of blues guitar, strangely pitched voices representing a mere echo of humanity, making almost-words, communicating almost-feelings.

DARKSIDE is a collaboration between guitarist Dave Harrington and electronic producer Nicolas Jaar. While Jaar plunges you deep into a weird, hushed environment of carefully-honed abstract sounds, Harrington’s strings bring in the human element and a primal sense of groove and rhythm. Together they create a captivating kind of minimal house with progressive builds that is strange yet warm; an unlikely duality that climbs and falls in a hypnotic, head-nodding fashion.

DARKSIDE is deep, enigmatic, benign, exploratory. Let it caress the ears and awaken the senses.

http:// http://www.darksideusa.com